News arrives that our Scandinavian cousins are getting serious in the war on cash.

The Danish government has proposed getting rid of the obligation for selected retailers to accept payment in cash, moving the country closer to a “cashless” economy. Nearly a third of the Danish population uses MobilePay…

Actually half of the adult population of Denmark use MobilePay, the mobile-initiated account-to-account (mA2A) immediate payment services, the equivalent of Barclays’ PingIt, that is offered by Danske bank in Denmark. It was launched two years ago and has attracted more than two million users out of a population of 5.5 million which, when you look at the demographics, means that already has around two thirds of its total addressable market (i.e., Danish smartphone users aged 13 and up). Right now it is processing around 200,000 transactions per day with an average value of around €33.

The mobile phone provides a secure and convenient A2A initiator.

MobilePay has over 7000 merchants signed up and has an “small business acceptance” app in place so that merchants can accept electronic payments without a POS terminal. They charge merchants a flat 1% fee (with a maximum of five Danish Krone, or abut 50p) for payments and I’m told (by a very reliable source) that the fraud levels through this channel are significantly lower than they are on cards. They are now extending the app to provide a contactless NFC and Bluetooth option for point of sale. What interests me most about their roadmap is that they have a very good API and are now trialling it with some merchants because, as we all know, merchants want on their own apps to deliver the best customer service and the future is “app and pay”. I saw a very good example of this using a Copenhagen coffee shop app.

Direct A2A payments from inside merchant apps look set to grow.

In the UK, we have two mA2A mobile-centric front ends to the faster payments service (FPS). These are the aforementioned PingIt, offered by Barclays, and Paym, offered by everyone else. Paym has around two million people registered and transferred around £26m in 2014, We happen to be a Barclays-centric household, so I use PingIt all the time and find it very convenient. Therefore I was very excited that they decided to extend their addressing from mobile phone numbers to Twitter names!

Barclays has declared on 25 February that it will be the first British bank to allow people to pay each other and small business through their Twitter handles from 10 March.

If you want to try this out for yourself by supporting a good cause, by the way, then simply fire up the PingIt app on your mobile phone, select a modest amount for test purposes (say, £250) and send it to @dgwbirch. I will let you know as soon as your payments reaches the Dave Birch Holiday Home in the South of France Emergency Appeal Fund. Both PingIt and Paym are a long way from being used by half the adult population of the UK and edging cash out of the way for the person in the street but, back across the North Sea, Mobile Pay is playing a key role is edging Denmark closer to cashlessness.

The Danish government said as of next year, businesses such as clothing retailers, petrol stations and restaurants should no longer be legally-bound to accept cash. The proposal is part of a pre-election package of economic growth measures aimed at reducing costs and increasing productivity for businesses.

The context here is specific to Denmark. In common law countries (e.g., the UK and the USA) there is no requirement for retailers to accept any form of payment at all, cash included. It’s a misunderstand of what “legal tender” means to imagine that they do. But in Denmark, the law says that certain types of retailer must accept cash and so the law is being changed so that they don’t have to.

The Danes are very welcoming to visiting consultants.

I think it is really interesting to see this approach to national payment strategy – that is, one based on productivity and economic efficiency – in contrast to the UK’s where the mere idea of ending cheque clearing in a decade was enough to induce apoplexy in the shires and a shake up of the UK payments industry governance.

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